


You look like therapy (Exactly what I need)

by SquaresAreNotCircles



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Coda, Episode: s06e11 Kuleana (One's Personal Sense of Responsibility), Fluff, Getting Together, Humor, M/M, Therapy, kind of?, veers towards crack-ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-30
Updated: 2019-10-30
Packaged: 2021-01-13 11:16:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21243206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquaresAreNotCircles/pseuds/SquaresAreNotCircles
Summary: “Yeah, not with each other,” Steve pipes up. He makes a gesture between himself and Danny, which he cuts off abruptly halfway through. He frowns like he’s afraid it might have been too suggestive. “We’ve, uh, we’ve never had sex.”“Well, would you like to?” Loraine asks.Or: Steve and Danny attend an accidentally-Governor-mandated group therapy session on overcoming sexual incompatibility. It goes surprisingly well.





	You look like therapy (Exactly what I need)

**Author's Note:**

> I remember watching this episode (6.11, aka the one with “oops! Steve accidentally signed them up for couples therapy, haha, how silly!” as an actual plotline) for the first time somewhere in September 2018 and thinking, oh wow, there’s probably _heaps_ of fic dealing with the fact that the itinerary says they’re supposed to talk about overcoming sexual incompatibility. And then there wasn’t. So I started writing this, but it was being difficult and got mostly abandoned as a result, and then I found it yesterday and it was basically done already so I filled in the gaps and now, finally, over a year later, here’s my humble contribution to the wonderful world of Kuleana fic, because my philosophy is that if you’re in a fandom with this kind of nonsense in canon, you should probably make use of it, too.
> 
> A quick refresher: in 6.11 Steve has signed Danny and himself up for something called the Better Partners Bootcamp with the idea that they’ll fill all their Governor mandated therapy hours for the year over a single weekend, but when they arrive, they quickly realize Steve “read the course description wrong” (his words! not mine) and they’re now stuck in actual couples therapy. They decide to stay anyway, Steve is a bit of a dick and makes Danny twist his ankle and goes out and gets drunk with a woman they met on the plane, Danny is moody and complains a lot, and that’s basically all you need to know. 
> 
> The title was taken from of the lyrics of _Therapy_ by Armin van Buuren and James Newman.

Danny hates this. He _hates_ it, and he hates even more that the room where they’re having this godawful so-manieth group therapy session is on the ground floor of the building, because even the fantasy of jumping out of the window and praying for a quick death is taken away from him.

At least he doesn’t seem to be the only one hating it. During Loraine’s introductory spiel about the importance of intimacy and sex in a relationship, which he mostly tunes out, the blonde woman, Karen, keeps giving him looks from across the neat circle of chairs. He raises an eyebrow at her once when he catches her, but she just raises an eyebrow back. Danny turns to Steve to share a look of understanding that this is all bullshit, but Steve is staring vacantly in the direction of Loraine. It’s anyone’s guess if he’s actually listening or not.

So Danny sits there and suffers and most of it is not even because of his twisted ankle, which is resting on a chair in front of him pretty comfortably. He wonders if he could get a third chair and line them all up and lie down for a nap without anyone stopping him. Probably not.

“So before we begin,” Loraine says after what already felt like an eternity. Still, they’re key words that make Danny pay slightly more attention. If they’re finally starting, the end is also drawing closer. “Does anyone have any questions?” 

“Yeah, I do,” Karen says, and Danny already knows he’s going to be annoyed by whatever comes next. She turns to him and Steve, and that’s when he really, really knows. “So I know I asked this before, but really, _why_ are you still here? Surely you don’t have to be here for the part where we discuss sex, since you two are, you know, not having any.”

“Hey,” Danny says, gratified to be proven right. He definitely is annoyed. “We have lots of sex.”

He can see Steve’s head swivel around to him, but refuses to pay attention to his dramatics. Good to know what grabs Steve’s attention, anyway.

“With other people,” he does add, for the sake of clarity. It would be nice if Steve could be the one to do that, every once in a while. Danny was the one specifying they were work partners to the woman on the plane, too.

“Yeah, not with each other,” Steve pipes up. He makes a gesture between himself and Danny, which he cuts off abruptly halfway through. He frowns like he’s afraid it might have been too suggestive. “We’ve, uh, we’ve never had sex.”

“Well, would you like to?” Loraine asks. She does it in a pretty reasonable tone of voice, which is entirely unreasonable from every possible angle, because _what the fuck_.

“_No,_” Danny says, vehemently, while Steve babbles through him with a, “No, nope, nuh-uh.”

The lesbians – Geena with the surplus of necklaces and Something-Something, the butch one – look at each other and then at them. Danny feels very naked, and this is exactly why he didn’t want to do couples counselling with Rachel when their marriage fell apart. Doing it with his best friend in a group doesn’t improve the situation any (which is a combination of words he’s not going to dwell on for too long, because he’s pretty sure this is not that type of resort, anyway, unless Steve ‘misread’ some more things).

“Besides,” Danny says, and he gets that feeling, that stressed tingle at the back of his mind that warns him he’s about to say something stupid just to fill a silence. He almost manages to keep his mouth shut, but almost is still not good enough. “I’m pretty sure Steve got lucky last night anyway.”

“Steve?” Loraine asks. She sounds so studiedly non-judgmental that it circles back around to a very strong _what did you do, young man_ vibe.

Steve shoots Danny a betrayed look. “So I uh, I went out for a drink last night.”

The man from one of the two straight couples – the one with curly grey hair who looks like the CEO of something – sits up even straighter than he already looks with his wife at his side. “I thought we weren’t supposed to spend time alone,” he says, in a veiled hopeful way that suggests he’s either having cravings for a drink that are serious enough that he should be attending a different kind of group therapy, or he wants to get away from his wife so much there’s probably no hope for them left. 

To be fair, if Danny were married to this guy’s wife, he’d probably be a little nervous, too. She has very sleek dark hair, a continuously haughty-bored look and killer eyebrows, and she’s gorgeous in that way that makes Danny suspect poor CEO guy might already be her second or third husband and any previous spouses perished under mysterious circumstances. Danny remembers her name as Morgan, and the only reason that stuck with him was because he had a college girlfriend by that name. He’s reasonably certain this is not her, though. Not unless she grew nearly a foot, changed the color of her skin and got rid of the entirety of her sleeve tattoo.

Out of the corner of his eye, Danny catches Steve giving him another withering look. He answers it plainly, wondering what crawled up Steve’s ass and died this time. 

He only realizes Loraine has been very earnestly admonishing Steve for breaking the curfew when she stops talking, and the sudden absence of her voice makes a sense of peace wash over him. He manages to reasonably cover his snort of laughter with a cough. The only one who sees through him is probably Steve – they know each other too well.

Steve gives no outward indication of having caught him out, but that’s just because he’s busy pretending to look contrite. “I’m very sorry for not respecting the rules, Loraine. In my defense, I had already set the date before I knew that kind of thing wouldn’t be allowed, so it would have been rude of me to stand up the person I was meeting.”

Danny doesn’t need to look at his ankle to remember how he injured it. He doesn’t bother covering up his snort this time, but it’s really more one of derision than laughter anyway, and there’s no point in that if the people or person you’re mocking doesn’t hear it.

Steve turns to him and clamps a heavy hand on his shoulder. “Danny,” he says weightily, “I’m sorry for leaving you all on your own.”

“Very good,” Loraine coos, but Steve is not done yet.

“And just to clarify, I didn’t get lucky, as you so eloquently put it.” He squeezes Danny’s shoulder once, just a little too hard, before he takes his hand back. “The woman I was meeting was married, actually.”

“Really?” Danny asks. It’s maybe a little gleeful. It’s not his fault if Steve striking out after unceremoniously dumping him – literally, on the floor, which is why Danny has to limp everywhere now – makes him feel a little like things are right with the universe again. Also relieved, in that strange way he’s never able to pin down but that’s always connected to rough times for Steve’s dating life somehow. “I didn’t see a ring on her finger.”

“She’s a pastry chef. She’s grown used to wearing it on a necklace.” Steve glances at him and there’s something in his expression, or in his eyes, maybe, that tells Danny that despite all the posturing now, Steve is genuinely sorry for ditching him. Steve proves this by offering up, “Her friend was single, though. He was also a guy.”

Danny graciously does not laugh in his face. “So when you came back to our room and said the girls missed me…”

“I meant Alyssa and me. The friend kept calling me she and her. I guess he thought it was funny.”

“It’s a thing,” the Geena lesbian assures Steve.

“Can I just ask something?” the other lesbian pipes up.

“Sure,” Danny says. He feels like he’s walking into a trap, but saying no doesn’t seem like a viable option in a therapy session where they’re supposed to open up and encourage each other to speak.

“I know you say you’ve never had sex-”

“Because we haven’t,” Steve points out, very astutely, Danny thinks. Maybe this is what will save their partnership: bonding together over the absurdity of how absolutely convinced other people seem to be that they’re fucking.

“-but if you had to give me one reason for that, one truthful reason, off the top of your head, what would that be?”

Steve doesn’t seem to need even so much as a millisecond to think before he answers, “Danny has a girlfriend.”

“Babe,” Danny sighs. He rubs his temple and reconsiders his own words. “_Steve_, that’s not going to convince them you don’t want to get in my pants.”

“Neither is you calling me babe all the time,” Steve volleys back. He may have a point, but damned if Danny’s going to admit it.

“I call everyone babe! I called the espresso maker babe last week when it wouldn’t cooperate.”

Steve shoots him a cocky sideways grin. “Because it made you think of me?”

“Because it made me think of you, yeah, sure, you egomaniac.”

“This is…” Loraine pauses for a moment, looking genuinely stumped for the first time since they met her. Danny is viciously proud of managing to break her cheerful façade. “…getting a little off-topic,” she eventually finishes. “Danny, try not to challenge Steve’s answers so much, but instead ask yourself how you can respond to what he’s saying in a constructive manner. Would you like to share your own answer to Kate’s question with us?”

“Not really,” he says, because they did ask him to be truthful.

Loraine tucks her chin into her neck and smiles at him beseechingly. He’s not sure how she manages to channel this much kindly elementary school teacher and still somehow make him feel guilty for not opening up about his sex life to a group of mostly strangers. 

Meanwhile, the room is still on the ground floor, there is still no feasible escape option, and he’ll have to give the hungry wolves something, at least. “Okay, so maybe, um. Maybe I haven’t been telling the entire truth recently, per se.”

He gets a lot of disgruntled and disapproving looks for that, but the only one that matters to him is Steve’s. “What? In what way?”

“I, well, I suppose I kind of broke things off with Melissa two weeks ago.”

“_Why?_” Steve repeats. “I thought you loved her.”

That’s a tricky one. He chews his lip, but at least this is something he knew he was going to have to tell Steve eventually, so he can live with it if that happens to mean also telling seven other people. “I don’t really know if I ever did or not. I never told her I did, even though she was clearly getting, you know, a little impatient with me, after two years.” 

“You dated that woman for _two years_ and never told her you loved her?” Karen sounds aghast.

“Yeah, I figured that was probably a little weird.” He shrugs, because there’s not much else he can do about all those eyes boring into his skull, aside from previously mentioned ineffective window jumping, which would get him into far too much trouble with Loraine and Steve. “I couldn’t. That was one of the reasons I ended things.”

“But that’s crazy,” Steve says, still stuck on disapproving. His eyes haven’t left Danny’s face once since Danny broke the news. Danny isn’t even sure he’s blinked. “You say those words really easily.”

Danny wants to both punch Steve right in the nose and pet his naïve little head. It’s a war of sensations he’s grown more and more used to over the course of their friendship. “No, I really don’t,” he counters, and half hopes Steve will leave it at that for once.

Of course the other half of him, that secretly hopes Steve will pursue the matter with that dogged determination of his, is the half that is granted its wish. “Yeah, you do,” Steve counters, with the full weight of absolute certainty behind it. “You say it to me all the time.”

Danny waves a useless hand at him, but it’s not going to do either of them any good. “Because it’s _you_, Steve. I don’t just go around telling people in my life I love them all the time, come on.”

“Aww,” someone in the group says, but Danny doesn’t bother to check who it is. 

Steve, bless his heart, freezes, like this is actual news to him. Danny would swear he can see Steve’s brain rebooting behind those expressive eyes of his. Steve opens his mouth, closes it, and gives his head a little shake. “Okay,” he says, sounding like the universe just rearranged itself right in front of him.

“So, just so I’m clear on this,” Karen says. “You, Danny, are not in a relationship, but in fact single, and you tell your best friend and work partner that you love him all the time because you do, but you broke up with your last girlfriend because you didn’t feel that way about her?”

Danny hates her. He really does. “Yes. I guess you could put it that way.”

“Look, I’m not an expert on same-sex relationships-”

“I am,” Geena says. She glances at her wife – Kate, apparently – who is already watching her with a look so fond it reminds Danny of Steve (but only because both are things that make him want to punch something, of course – that’s the only reason). “And I’m telling you, it sounds like you’re really good friends-”

“Great!” Danny says, with a faint hope of stopping her right there before she gets to whatever the horrible end of that sentence will be. “I agree! You’re right.”

“-but there’s also a little more going on, and you need to talk about it and figure out what you both want, and move forward from there.”

“Less great,” Danny says. “You’re not right anymore.”

There’s a silence in the group. Even Loraine is waiting for something, and Danny knows what it is because he can feel Steve staring at him by the tingling in the left side of his face. He refuses to look for as long as he can, until eventually there is no escape left but surrender.

He turns his head to look at Steve. “Yes, Steven?”

“Oh, nothing,” Steve says casually, still staring so hard Danny’s surprised he doesn’t have holes in his head yet. “It’s just funny to me that you accuse me of having a hard time talking about my feelings, when you’re, you know, doing what you’re doing right now.”

“Hey, I resent that. I talk about my feelings all the time, okay? I tell you I love you, I yell at you about how I _feel_ that you shouldn’t be jumping off of buildings while people are shooting at you-”

“Those two things have never once happened concurrently,” Steve interjects, but Danny might be the only one who catches the actual words, because he just keeps talking.

“-and then I yell a little more when you do it anyway every single time, and I tell you that you look good when I think you do, I always call you to tell you about my day when we haven’t seen each other in over twelve hours, you’re the first person I tell when something happens with Grace or Charlie, whether it’s good or bad, sometimes even before Rachel-”

“I am?”

“Of course you are!” Danny can’t help it – really can’t help it – if his volume rises a bit there, because Steve is being an idiot again. “You love those kids, my kids, like they’re your own. Who else am I gonna call? Melissa never even met Charlie before I ended things, but you were at the hospital every day, and the one time you couldn’t make it he was asking for you and you videocalled, remember?”

“Now there’s kids involved?” the CEO guy asks. Next to him, Morgan raises one of those deadly eyebrows and Danny barely suppresses a shiver.

“Danny,” Steve says, awed, “those kids are your whole entire world, and you trust me with them that much.”

If Steve acts any more surprised, Danny is going to feel insulted. “I’d like think we’ve established that by now, you doofus. I love you.”

Steve beams. “I love you too.”

“This is good,” Loraine says. “This is very good. There’s lots of communication going on here.” She gives a rueful little chuckle. “I would call this a successful session, but I’m not sure if there’s any way we can overcome the kind of sexual incompatibility presented by both of you being straight men-”

“Oh, it’s overcome,” Steve says, and once again Danny talks right through him, blurting, “Who are you calling straight?”

“I’m sorry, detective.” Loraine gives him an encouraging smile. “What would you label yourself as?”

“I don’t know. Someone who experimented in college, I guess.”

“We all did that,” Karen’s husband offers, before turning very, very red.

Danny gives him a moment to turn even redder. “Yeah, I just don’t think we all did it with a boyfriend of four months who we introduced to our family, almost giving our poor grandma a heart attack, before he cheated on us.”

There’s movement in the corner of Danny’s eye. It’s Steve shooting bolt upright. “What’s his name?” Steve demands, the kind of fire in his eyes that he usually reserves for mass murderers and people who hurt children or animals.

“Steve, you’re not going to dangle my college boyfriend off a building for something that happened two decades ago.”

“No, I’m going to _throw_ the guy who _cheated on you_ off a building, right after I-”

“Commander!” Loraine yells, before Danny gets a chance to do some more of his own yelling at Steve, which Danny thinks is supremely unfair. “This is not a productive way to deal with your feelings. Try putting them into words for Detective Williams.” She circles a hand through the air in a ‘go on’ motion. “I feel…”

Steve glares at her, and then turns his glare to Danny. “I _feel_,” he starts, with such exaggeration that Danny rolls his eyes at him, “that I want to shoot this ex of yours, and also that you have terrible taste in romantic partners, Jesus, Danny.”

“What was so wrong with Melissa?”

“Nothing was wrong with Melissa, except that she was way too young for you. I was talking about this guy and either Gabby, who only texted you she wasn’t coming home when you were already at the airport with Grace to pick her up, or Rachel, your ex-wife who told you that she was having your second child, then claimed he wasn’t yours for three years, and only told you that you really did have a son when he was close to dying and needed your bone marrow.”

Danny bristles at that. He pokes a finger in Steve’s ridiculous bicep. “Yeah, well, at least my mom didn’t fake her death because she felt guilty about killing the wrong person and had to go raise a future murderer.”

“I didn’t _choose_ my mother, Danny-”

“Do you think I _chose_ to have Rachel withhold my own son from me for years? Or to have her break my heart, because that-”

“No, of course not! I’m just saying that I wouldn’t do that, and you’re an idiot if you don’t know it by now.”

Danny feels it’s time to scowl deeply, so he does just that. “What are you even saying? You wouldn’t get pregnant with my child while still married to some douchewad millionaire and then claim the baby is his because you don’t like my job?”

“That too,” Steve says, which, wow, generous of him, “but I _meant_ I wouldn’t break your heart.”

Danny refuses to label what said major organ does in his chest right then as skipping a beat. It’s just taking a tiny pause. Hearts do that sometimes. They get tired too. 

Okay, so Danny is not a doctor, sue him.

“What makes you think you have any effect on my heart whatsoever, huh?” he asks. Somehow, their argument has slowed down enough that there’s no more shouting, and barely any bite to the words. 

Steve gives him an almost amused look. “You tell me daily that I’ll be to blame for the heart attack that eventually kills you.”

“That’s very different.”

“Is it?”

Karen’s husband appears extremely conflicted. “What even are your lives?”

“Trust me,” Danny tells him, “I ask myself that question every day.”

Karen shares a commiserating look with her husband and then sits up. “Okay, new recap: Steve’s reason for not wanting to have sex was that Danny had a girlfriend, but in reality Danny is single and not straight and you love each other and you’re raising Danny’s kids together and you don’t mind the idea of having sex with each other.”

“What,” Morgan says, completely flat. It’s the first word out of her mouth all session.

“So what’s the holdup?” Kate asks. She’s holding Geena’s hand.

Danny comes up with and discards several different answers. 

“I didn’t pack any condoms,” is what he eventually settles on. Geena makes a sound like a dying whale and tries unsuccessfully to hide her laughter in her wife’s shoulder. Kate pulls her closer with a hand on the back of her head immediately, grinning into her hair.

“I did,” Steve pipes up. “Not that I was being presumptuous, I’m just, you know. Prepared for every eventuality.”

“You boy scout, you.” Danny means to tease Steve, and that’s how he intends for those words to come out, but instead he says them through a sappy grin and they sound like it.

“Well,” Loraine says cheerfully, but Danny is not really interested in what else she has to say. He looks at Steve and he doesn’t even have to say anything before Steve is at his side and helping him up out of the chair, an arm around his shoulder to keep the weight off his bum ankle.

“We’re leaving,” Steve announces, and Danny could kiss him. Even more than he could previously, that is.

“Wait, do they just get to skip therapy now to go have sex?” CEO guy asks, but it’s somewhere behind Danny’s back, because he and Steve are already halfway out the door.

**Author's Note:**

> Fun fact: I got the names of the other therapy participants from name tags that are mostly readable if you pause the episode at the right points, but before I went for that bit of Canon Compliance™ I was just making up names, and the one I used for Morgan was Amanda, meaning this fic had a line saying that Danny had a girlfriend in college whose name was Amanda, and oh God, in hindsight, now that we know Rachel’s mother’s name and what Danny’s relationship with her looked like? That would have been scarring, oh gosh.
> 
> Thank you for reading! Comments are like dogs. They universally make my life a more enjoyable experience and they’re always welcome in my home. ❤
> 
> I’m on Tumblr as [itwoodbeprefect](https://itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com), or with my exclusively H50 (and mostly McDanno) sideblog as [five-wow](https://five-wow.tumblr.com).


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